Why not just create a Visual Basic script that will configure things for
them or put up a website where they can cut and paste the information from?

Luke Howard wrote:

My understanding is that if a search base is not set (i.e. -b '') one can
look at the namingContexts attribute in the root DSE to find the branch
names. Testing with Outlook Express and Mozilla showed that this didn't
work (they couldn't find the search base on their own).

Well, if Outlook Express and Mozilla don't look at the namingContexts
attribute, that's their problem. But you can set a default search base in
slapd.conf with the defaultsearchbase directive. This will rewrite one
level and subtree searches of the root DSE to some arbitrary suffix.